Up All Night: Season 1 (2011)

Up All Night is a sitcom without any real tension or conflict, and that makes it feel pretty weird. Like so many sitcom leads before them, Christina Applegate and Will Arnett play a couple whose lives feel like they’re going to implode when they have a baby. However, their lives stay right on track, as Applegate gets more flexible hours at work – she manages a talk show host, played by Maya Rudolph – while Arnett is quite content to be a stay-at-home dad. They have occasional minor quibbles, moments when things seem to have changed a bit, but they’re so trivial that they don’t even need to be resolved by the end of the episode. Like an elegantly designed, eminently tasteful kitchen, there’s not a single frictive surface anywhere, not even the least hint of danger. Rudolph perhaps comes closest to providing some point of resistance – she pumps as much sass in as possible – but even she’s absorbed back into the supreme inoffensiveness of it all. For long stretches, you can’t quite figure out where the show is, or whether it’s even a show any more. If anything, it’s like a weird new convergence of sitcom and reality television, or a sitcom made to win over an audience reared on reality domesticity. After all, if sitcoms were originally about settling into the comforting propinquity of an alternative living room, then they’ve really found their fullest expression in reality television, something Up All Night totally embraces. Devoid of even the most rudimentary micro-tensions, it’s more about just basking in the situationless ambience of it all, as well as the residual charisma of the actors. Fortunately, they’re all pretty likeable, especially Rudolph, who’s given a great opportunity to prove just how much she gets from Minnie Ripperton. Still, it's not quite enough to get the comedy going, which is even more remarkable in that sitcoms are one of the most low maintenance genres – give a sitcom family a few itches or irritations and they can spin them out for generations. But Up All Night has a totally different level of self-momentum, making it hard to tell whether it’s strange that it was cancelled, or just irrelevant. In either case, it’s as disinterested in you as Applegate, Arnett and Rudolph would presumably be in real life, so mellow and low-key that it's suddenly your life that becomes the sitcom, if only the sitcom of how and why, exactly, you seek out this one.